Sometimes I get long-winded

If I’ve been largely silent on the latest Clinton/Obama Wal-Mart/Slumlord slapfight, it’s for three reasons:

1) Whatever fireworks there are on the D side, the R side is such a complete fiasco that it’s automatically a lot funnier.

2) I don’t have a dog in the D hunt just yet; I’ve leaned various ways, but right now I’m back to being officially undecided.

3) A disappointing number of liberal blogs have become absolutely unreadable once a candidate position is announced; it’s just an endless litany of “Candidate X strangles kittens; fortunately, Candidate Y has miraculous healing powers.” The worst offender at the moment is Daily Kos which, with its massive readership and Scoop-based public commenting system, has turned into the Star Wars Cantina of liberal blogging.

Nevertheless, I’d like to point out that what you’re currently seeing in the Democratic primary/cage match are merely the knotty, gnarled trees in a tangled forest that puts Mirkwood to shame… Be forewarned that this will be one of those posts that makes you wonder if I’m getting paid by the word.

The current meltdown is interesting because it’s not breaking neatly along the lines people necessarily think it should be. It’s not completely black vs. other, woman vs. man, establishment vs. outsider, liberal vs. centrist, young vs. old. It sometimes lends itself to those interpretations – Clinton’s callously tossed away an alarming percentage of the African American vote, for example, while Obama increasingly abandons his previous post-identity-politics persona -- but the full picture gets a little more complicated, especially when you realize that in terms of ideology, there’s little if any difference between the two.

The largest difference between Clinton and Obama is a matter of strategy – not a question of where the nation should go, but a question of how it should get there.

Clinton came of age in national politics during her husband’s Presidency, the beginning of the “Third-Way Politics” era. The basic premise was that in the current American political climate, it was impossible to advance progressive policy goals in the traditional way; an appeal to the middle needed to me made, and the best way to do this was through a strategy of triangulation. In other words, when given a choice between Policy A and Policy B, aim for Policy C.

Sometimes this resulted in out-conserving the conservatives (particularly in fiscal policy); other times it resulted in policy mush that pleased no one and advanced nothing. In trying not to offend anyone, third-way politics also had the effect of not making anyone particularly happy.

Let’s take a couple of LGBT issues as examples: If there’s a choice between allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly in the military and not allowing them to serve at all, the triangulated position is “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” If the choice is between passing ENDA and not passing it, the triangulated choice is to let it die in the Senate year after year. From an LGBT rights standpoint, the Clinton years were a wash; the executive branch was not overtly hostile (the atrocity of DOMA being an exception), but it was not particularly supportive. In an effort not to annoy the mythical "average American" voter, the Democrats tried to meet conservative Republicans halfway, leaving many cherished progressive goals in their wake.

This is emblematic of what happened to progressive political goals overall during the Clinton years; the Democratic Party strategists desperately tried to please those who would never be pleased while slighting those who were among its staunchest supporters. Insert your own bad relationship/ damaged childhood metaphors.

...and the fact that most of those triangulated dichotomies were false to begin with would bring on another thousand words. Best for me to stick with the basic plot...

All of this was a product of the electoral model that showed us a split electorate – roughly speaking, 40% Democrat, 40% Republican, and the middle up for grabs. To achieve and maintain political power, the Democrats only needed to keep the Republicans from gaining more than 9.9% of the middle -- 50.1% of the vote wins the election, after all.

With that kind of view, everything becomes defense. No gains need be made so long as we can prevent losses. And indeed, if we make too many gains, they might offend people and lead to losses.

Hence the adoption of an electoral strategy based not on winning but on not losing. This was the central strategy point of the Democratic Party up until 2006. It led to the wholesale abandonment of entire states -- entire regions -- in favor of ensuring victory in reliable electoral pockets and hoping that would be enough to carry the day.

Enter Howard Dean, who challenged this conventional wisdom and, as head of the DNC, has devoted considerable time, energy and money into turning it on its head. The Democrats made surprising electoral gains in the mountain west in 2006, including in such unlikely states as Colorado and Arizona. To oversimplify things a bit, Dean had very quickly put into place an infrastructure that was able to take advantage of the collapse of the Republicans. Dean’s outlook is based on the idea that in order to make progress on policy goals, popular support must be deep, broad-based and widespread; progressive goals will only be achieved with a deep political mandate, and a party can only achieve that mandate by playing offense -- not by bringing the Democratic Party to the political center, but by bringing the center to the Party.

This is a threat to the established order, a rebuke to the established way of doing things. And this is exactly the kind of broad-based movement and electoral mandate Obama has openly stated that he is trying to achieve. And this kind of strategy is the diametric opposite of what Clinton has been practicing for her entire political career.

The electoral map that gave birth to third-way politics has shifted so fundamentally as to be useless; at the risk of pointing out the obvious, it’s not 1992 anymore. And sixteen years of progressive political energy has been spent defending what most progressives feel should never have needed defending.

Rightly or wrongly, many of those frustrated progressives have latched onto Obama as their champion. He has, with amazing prescience, recognized the moment and is attempting to seize it. And Hillary Clinton is trying to sell the party on her ability to thread a needle that no longer exists.

That’s the forest. Now you can go back to ogling the trees.